NEW YORK, NY.- Coinciding with the artists retrospective at New Yorks Museum of Modern Art, Christies Private Sales exhibits Claes Oldenburgs acclaimed sculpture of 1976 on Madison Avenue, just one block from the MoMA.

While the Museum of Modern Art exhibition (April 14August 5, 2013) examines the beginnings of Oldenburgs extraordinary career with an in-depth look at his first two major bodies of work: The Street (1960) and The Store (196164), Christies Private Sales illustrates the artists later work of the 1970s, when Oldenburg began sketching the mass-produced typewriter eraser, which he rendered within imagined landscapes in order to explore its potential as a large public sculpture. Executed in 1976, Typewriter Eraser consists of a giant disk-shaped eraser surmounted by a large brush, with bristles turned upward in dynamic grace. Oldenburg transforms this once-ubiquitous office accessory, wryly repositioned as a large monument.

Oldenburg was initially drawn to the concept of an enlarged typewriter eraser as it seemed like "a fine anti-heroic subject" perfectly suited for the office plaza on Manhattan's Fifty-Seventh Street. This now-obsolete item of stationary had been a favorite plaything from Oldenburgs days of visiting his father's office as a boy. Although this project was never realized, Oldenburg remained strongly attached to this strangely exuberant object and continued to use the idea for a number of drawings, prints and sculptures in varying scales and mediums, including this metal and cement version executed in a small edition of three.

Typewriter eraser was sold at Christie's in New York, on May 2009 for the world auction record price of $2,210,500, and is now offered for private sale by Christies.